AI for students: can it be useful?

Who isn’t using AI?

On average, students reported using more than two AI study tools to help them. One in five students said they use more than three.

For the majority of students, it’s the cure for tedious online research and planning long-winded essays — if used in the right way.

How many students use AI?

Did you know….In August 2024, a survey of university students from 16 countries revealed that 86% regularly use AI in their university work. 54% of students use AI every week and 24% use it on a daily basis. Things are no doubt even higher than that today…

The same survey suggests they’re using it to:

• Search information (69%)
• Check grammar (42%)
• Summarise (33%) and paraphrase (28%) documents
• Create a first draft of their work (24%)

How many are using AI to cheat?

It’s difficult to say how many students are using AI in university to cheat since what’s classed as “cheating” isn’t exactly easy to define.

We can give a picture of the types of activity that are widely considered unethical, and how many students admit to it.

Forbes reported that:

• 48% of students used ChatGPT to complete a test or quiz at home
• 53% used ChatGPT to write an essay (not just the outline to it)

A different study of UK students’ use of AI in higher education found that 5% of students copy and pasted AI generated text into their assignments without editing it.

Who’s owning up to this, though? Clearly, these are cases where students have admitted fault, however, some simply don’t know what the rules are when it comes to using AI. More than half the student population don’t feel properly informed about how to use AI effectively to help them with their course.

Knowing exactly what’s out there and what it’s designed for is a good way to make sure you select and use your AI tools responsibly and don’t lose out to others with this competitive edge in their studies.

How can students use AI?

Always ask for AI usage guidelines from your university and individual course tutors, if available! Honestly, better to read these now than find out later that you’ve put your grade, and your university place, in jeopardy through misusing AI.

For example, current guidance from the University of Cambridge on AI use in coursework states that students must:

• Acknowledge all use of generative AI programs, even initial research
• Clearly reference all AI-generated material. This includes stating the exact prompt, name and version of AI program used, and the date it was accessed
• Interrogate websites cited by AI and discuss how they’ve checked for accuracy or accounted for bias.

At this point, using AI then having to fact and bias-check the results and offer an explanation might be more work than doing the research outright from credible sources and simply quoting them in your bibliography.

Especially when there are AI tools to help with that. Check these out…

So, what AI tools can you use?

As long as you’re following your university’s guidelines, AI has the potential to make your life easier without compromising on your education.

There are many AI productivity apps designed to streamline different tasks.

Note taking

Notion is great for organising your lecture notes and files into different folders. People usually do this by course module. You can also create toggled lists to create revision notes and test questions for you to come back and test yourself.

OneNote is similar. You can divide up your notes into files and use tags and categories to find what you need. You can also easily share and add people to your folders.

Task and deadline management

Todoist is great for keeping track of massive projects and deadlines. You can create top-level projects, subtasks, assign deadlines and see everything in calendar view if you want to. You can also filter your view by deadline or priority to focus on the here and now.

Research

ChatGPT and Claude are popular AI search tools. Students often use them to ask research questions, generate ideas, and explain and summarise concepts.

With Elicit, you can ask a research question and you’ll receive a summary drawn from a number of research papers (the more you pay, the greater the number of research papers it draws from to create your summary). All research papers are cited.

It’ll even give you a list of information categories you might want to extract for your summary in order to refine it.

Writing tools for students

AI writing tools for students will often fall under unacceptable use, particularly in subjects where your method of expression is part of the marking criteria.

However, if your own findings and perspectives aren’t enhanced by writing style, writing tools like QuillBot can be useful in helping you to rework your written material for clarity without losing your original meaning.

Be warned though, there are several tools which can detect AI-written and AI-paraphrased text such as Turnitin, which is widely used by universities to encourage original writing.

Asking for feedback

ChatGPT and Claude can identify and critique aspects of your writing and suggest improvements.

Grammarly Pro integrates with Microsoft and Google Docs so you can check your work in real-time. It can offer advanced feedback on writing style and it’ll explain why it’s suggested certain improvements.

Memorising

AI learning tools like Mindgrasp create summaries, notes, flashcards and quizzes from the material you give it. That could be a webpage or your course notes. It also features a Q&A bot trained on your content to make it feel interactive.

Citations and bibliography creation

Zotero and Mendeley are two AI tools that let you format your citations and references correctly according to the particular format you need. If using the Zotero browser extension, you can create a citation straight from the webpage you’re looking at.

AI benefits for students

AI for studying is an amazing tool. But just think about how to use it in the right way.

Tools that help you accurately consolidate and memorise information for study purposes have an obvious benefit for time-strapped students with vast amounts of study material to get through.

These tools also encourage you to interact with your study material and use it in a new way, rather than leave it to rot on your drive until a week before the exam.

AI tools that assess your work and explain where you can make improvements yourself are helpful feedback aids and make sure you’re making the most of your work.

Tools that replace traditional research or generate creative material are where it gets a little stickier. However, strict rules to highlight, interrogate and explain all AI usage might force greater levels of creativity.

For example, credit is usually limited to how you interpret findings and present new perspectives, rather than to quoting the findings themselves.

So, if you have to obviously cite all your AI-generated findings, greater focus will be put on what you say outside of them.

So, you’d better have something to say that stands out.

Potential drawbacks

Outside of risking your university place if you use AI incorrectly, there is one drawback that outweighs everything else. It hallucinates.

AI creates results and predictions for you based on patterns it “sees” in the data relating to your query. If the model it uses is flawed or the data is incomplete, the results you receive could be the same. The problem is, you won’t know since you can’t see how it’s working.

Another drawback is personal development. If you replace the process of learning, consolidating and adapting knowledge with quick results from AI, you’re less likely to be able to retain that knowledge and draw on it again in future when you need it most.

It’s also important in many areas of work and life to be able to make informed judgment calls, trace back your decisions and stand by them. To draw comparisons and conclusions unknown to AI and offer original analyses.

AI’s largely untraceable processes and lack of individual human experience and perspective won’t provide this.

Make sure it’s worth it for you

While you (obviously) have to follow your uni policy on AI use, it’s also important to decide for yourself what level of AI support you’re happy with and that you’re clear on how it’s going to enhance your education.

Because, when it comes to graduation day, you’ll want to know that you got the most out of your time and the money you’ll have to pay back. That you didn’t give AI the benefit of your education by feeding it the materials you were meant to study and the questions you were meant to answer yourself.

After all, AI only got to where it is now and grew so quickly, from learning.